Libertarian-Progressivism

[Tinker]

[Simple Minded]

Communities and organizations do solve these types of problems all the time. I think one of the biggest problems of our time is the desire for the Central Planners in DC to impose a one size fits all solution from DC on everyone.

A desire that is not confined to either side of the political spectrum.

Allowing people to vote with their feet and wallets often seems to solve a large number of problems.

Go back to the old bromide of "the private sector is the voluntary sector, the publice sector is the co-ercive sector."

Being responsible is relatively easy, and living within your means, is for the most part a natural part of life. Believing in free lunches, and forcing the other person to pay for your view of the utopian solution is when things get ugly.

How to impose moral standards on the other guy.... a timeless question!

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

Essentially what I am talking about is a modern twist on the Jeffersonian ideal.

[noddy]

[Tinker]

I don't look to hospitals. I look to teach children medicine.

[crashtech]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Simple Minded]

Tinker,

I agree with you a lot more often than you seem willing to acknowledge. Free markets and personal responsibility.

If people are to have any rights at all, the right to reap the benefits or consequences of what they have sown must be primary.

Most of our population, and our politicians all need to get past the binary political view of us vs. them. The labels of progressive and libertarian have become almost as meaningless as the labels of liberal or conservative.

People are individuals, not members of the monolithic "us" or the monolithic "them." The fact that we are stuck with only a two party system is a cause of the lot of the problem. The vast majority of people are very responsible with the resouces they earn, most are irresponsible with resources they view as free. Political solutions will not solve a lot of human problems, but that is how the system is organized.

Decentralize power and let the communities organize and focus on what they deem most important. People will vote with their feet and wallets. Communities will boom and bust as they deal with their changing needs and resources. Life is flux.

Still boils down to human nature, and unfortunately the quest for social justice often turns into a crusade for cosmic justice.

How did we ever get to the state where a person who chooses to eat or drink or smoke themselves to a state of ill health has the same $ claim on communal health care services as the responsible individual? What happened to the sense of personal responsibility?

When the knees, hips, or back give out on a person who chose to eat themselves to a state of 200% normal body weight, that is not a health care problem, it is a physics problem. The power of taxation to change behavior is well documented. Impose a fat tax, an alcoholism tax, or a cancer tax to achieve better behavior?

Abolish the FDA and AMA tomorrow and watch health care costs drop. Medicine involves risk, let the buyer beware.

I recently overheard a discussion where a woman and her husband were complaining that her husband's open heart surgery cost $64k and Blue Cross/Blue Shield only paid $34k. If they thought a $34k car is too expensive, they would not buy it. Yet the cost of additional lifespan at $34k is too high? Very few expect free automobiles, yet many expect free health care. Expectations.....

I have no idea how to make people act more rational, other than let them experience the benefits and pain of their own good and bad choices. some will learn in time, some never will.

The eternal search for angelic administrators to be chosen from the flawed humans continues.

A truly honest political discussion of public health care would not be couched in terms of free, but in terms of hidden taxes imbedded in the cost of staples that all must buy. To date, neither party has chosen the honest approach.

[Tinker]

Crashtech I think the terms left and right are poisonous. They are the ultimate evidence that we are divided and ruled. I was not accusing you of anything, I was questioning the usefulness of the terms. I do not think they are useful.

Simple Minded I think that a higher level of personal education would lower healthcare costs. If we understood it, we would buy less snake oil like prozac. As for making god or bad health choices, w have largely been too ignorant to make those. We are only recently coming to understand the real science of exercise. By recently I mean in the last five to ten years. But better education is meaningful in general if return if dependency is one's goal.

It is telling how ingrained authoritarianism is in our minds when I mention community healthcare at the municipal level, and people think of imposing it there. I was taking about collectives organized like credit unions. Shared funds that take care of people's health.

[I am ST]

[crashtech]

[Tinker]

[I am ST]

I'm not disagreeing w. you, you know, nor trying to "rebut" you or anything. Localization will happen when it makes economic and cultural sense that it happens. It railroads when it's time to railroad and all that.

The boundary between distributed (you call them grassroots) and hierarchical (centralized) organizations shifts in response to environmental and technological constraints.

Above it all floats the mighty god of Risk/Return on Capital. Perhaps in the 1950s when capital was scarce it made sense to have large conglomerates and state intervention -- the private market had a hard time putting up the funds for some needed projects. Nowadays, we can have private enterprises using advanced tech to achieve the same goals for one percent of the cost -- perhaps organizations like NASA and Boeing and GM are a bit outdated, while fields where scale still pays off (because of the need for huge up-front investments) like minerals and oil, are still in the hands of govts. and giant corporations. Even there there already is a huge and thriving market of small firms squeezing the last few drops from fields the dinosaurs abandoned after the easy pickings (oil&gas that can be reached through one big-ass megaproject) were taken.

Things that once took a real political party to engineer (a widescale protest against a politician or a business) can now sometimes happen because of one guy with a blog. It's pretty cool.

Cheers,
ST

[Ibrahim]

[YMix]

[CgDs]